William Susman Reissues Movie Music Album

from the Amazon.com Web page for the recording being discussed

William Susman’s Music for Moving Pictures album seemed to have been first released in May of 2009, probably coinciding with the premiere of one of the three films accounted for by the album title, When Medicine Got it Wrong, which was premiered that same month on KQED, the PBS (Public Broadcasting System) channel for the greater Boston area. The soundtrack is the source of the first eleven tracks on the album. They are followed by five tracks for Balancing Acts: A Jewish Theater in the Soviet Union, completed in 2008 and first screened in conjunction with a Marc Chagall exhibit first hosted by the Jewish Museum in New York and then by the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. The final track is the complete soundtrack for Native New Yorker, made in 2005 and winner of the best documentary short at that year’s Tribeca Film Festival in New York.

Many readers probably know by now that I have not really warmed up to Susman’s music. On this album he plays all the keyboard music, joined, as necessary, by cellist Joan Jeanrenaud and accordionist Mira Stroika. What is particularly disquieting, however, is that Jeanrenaud is credited with “all string parts.” In other words most of this music is a result of laying down tracks that can then be transferred over to the film. As the notes on the back of the album observe, in the days when films were silent, “live” music was provided as accompaniment. With the advent of film soundtracks, music would often be recorded by an ensemble in a screening room, with the conductor watching the film.

In that historical framework Susman is one of the harbingers of an “all-synthetic” technique, which no longer allows for spontaneous expressiveness. Separated from the films, such music makes for a relatively shallow listening experience, a far cry from the score composed for the ballet in the film The Red Shoes or the “complementary ironies” that emerge in much of the music that Nino Rota composed for the films of Federico Fellini. Perhaps Susman’s music “works” in the settings of the three films represented on this album; but there is little to draw the attentive listener to the audio in the absence of the video.